I am sure we were all taught this as kids. Don’t tell your brother he is stupid, that’s simply not a nice thing to say to anyone. I do agree with this, to an extent. If we all walked around telling all our friends and colleges how bad they are at their job, how tired they look today or have bad taste in clothes they have, the world probably wouldn’t be a very nice place at all.

However, sometimes people need to hear the truth and that truth might not always be that nice. But the reason for telling the truth might be solid, nice and heart warming. It just might not feel that way when you first hear the truth. Confused? I’ll try to explain.

Let’s say you have a sibling. Most of us have siblings and we care about them and love them. Let’s say your sibling think he has got a fantastic voice and he sings in the shower every day. Unfortunately his voice is terrible. Your spine hurts a little every time you hear him sing. But, you don’t have the heart to tell him, so every time he asks you say: You have an amazing voice, you should really pursue singing as your mission in life. Your parents don’t bother telling him either, they say the same as you: Best voice ever! His friends don’t want to offend your sibling, so they all encourage him to keep singing. So he does, and he believes he is an awesome singer, so he lines up for the auditions on Idol. And the judges are rolling on the floor laughing when they hear him and the 15 seconds he is allowed to sing turns into one of these clips they show over and over and over again every Idol episode of the season. And your poor sibling breaks down slowly as the season goes on.

Not very nice is it?

Another great example is telling your husband* he is ‘fine just they way he is’ when he is so fat that he can’t bend down to tie his shoe laces anymore. Don’t you think being that fat will somehow affect your beloved husband’s health in one way or the other? I’m sure he snores. And might be complaining about back pain or knee pain. He might have really high blood pressure. Or even diabetes? Eventually his heart will give in for the weight of his poor health, just because you didn’t tell him the truth. Because if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, right?

Picture from The Telegraph

Sometimes the truth is hard to handle, but in the end of the day, you might need to hear it to do something about it. We all need a kick up the butt to move forward, so do your friend a favour and tell them the truth today. Obviously, you need to screen a little bit, because if you start telling everyone about their bad hair day, ugly glasses and bad accents, you might end up with less friends than you started with.

*This could be wife, sister, mother, daughter, auntie, granddad, girlfriend, fiancee, ex-husband, brother, boyfriend or anyone else that you care about in life and want to have around as long as possible. According to a landmark study in 2012, obesity is now killing triple the number of people who die from malnutrition as it claims more than three million lives a year worldwide.